| This is No Case of Petty Right and Wrong | |
| This is no case of petty right or wrong | |
| That politicians or philosophers | |
| Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot | |
| With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers. | |
| Beside my hate for one fat patriot | 5 |
| My hatred of the Kaiser is love true: — | |
| A kind of god he is, banging a gong. | |
| But I have not to choose between the two, | |
| Or between justice and injustice. Dinned | |
| With war and argument I read no more | 10 |
| Than in the storm smoking along the wind | |
| Athwart the wood. Two witches’ cauldrons roar. | |
| From one the weather shall rise clear and gay; | |
| Out of the other an England beautiful | |
| And like her mother that died yesterday. | 15 |
| Little I know or care if, being dull, | |
| I shall miss something that historians | |
| Can rake out of the ashes when perchance | |
| The phoenix broods serene above their ken. | |
| But with the best and meanest Englishmen | 20 |
| I am one in crying, God save England, lest | |
| We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed. | |
| The ages made her that made us from dust: | |
| She is all we know and live by, and we trust | |
| She is good and must endure, loving her so: | 25 |
| And as we love ourselves we hate her foe. | |
This is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong — Thomas wrote this poem on 26 December 1915, after getting into a fierce argument with his father, who (following the usual opinion expressed in the newspapers at the time) considered the Germans inhuman brutes. Thomas had already been in the army six months but was still stationed in England as a map-reading instructor. |
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| Kaiser — Kaiser Wilhelm was the German Emperor and King of Prussia. He was also Queen Victoria’s eldest grandson, which made him the cousin of both George V of England and Nicholas II of Russia. | |
| Dinned — deafened or at least auditorially overwhelmed | |
| witches’ cauldrons — As seen in Macbeth, witches’ cauldrons are large metal pots used for various purposes, including seeing the future. | |
| dull — unintelligent, slow-witted | |
| phoenix — mythological bird that dies in flame but then is reborn from its own ashes | |
| meanest — poorest | |